FARMM, the Facility for Architectural Research in Media and Mediation, is a McGill University School of Architecture research hub that aims to unite researchers and students from within the School of Architecture and across the McGill campus with academic, institutional, industry, and professional researchers from around the world.

Fabricative knowledge

Research-creation and scholarly activity within FARMM is premised upon the assumption that to know is to know through making. It is a formidable mode of knowledge production that is unequivocally technologically situated. A central component of this discourse is the fact that architects, artists, and designers have the capacity to bring unique, relevant, and critical approaches to the use and development of technology that reshape society’s worldview in imaginative and ethical ways.

Research-creation: technics, design, and technology

Through project-based activities, the FARMM community is interested in an interdisciplinary research approach that explores the cultural role, philosophical implications, and creative or poetic capacities of new technologies within design and design-related fields. FARMM seeks to develop, frame, and understand innovative approaches to design and to promote the adoption and use of new technologies for design in an ethical and thoughtful manner relative to issues of cultural and environmental sustainability, architectural and urban design propositions, collaborative and artistic practices, and technological development. We aspire to provide world-class training environments for researchers and students alike.

Interdisciplinary Technics

FARMM is founded upon productive interdisciplinary collaboration bringing together multiple methodologies from architectural and urban design, artistic practices, and humanities-based scholarship to computer science and engineering. Design, whether characterized as ‘integrated’, ‘comprehensive’, or ‘sustainable’, is a complex and inherently collaborative endeavor. The technical, political-socio-cultural, and vital regimes exist in a complex mutual exchange. As such, the scholarly, applied, and creative investigation of our relationship to the environment requires a constellation of perspectives and methods.